James O’Keefe — Andrew Breitbart’s true heir

What made Andrew Breitbart extraordinary was that he understood that the best way to make a point was to show Progressives in the act of being hypocritical. This is different from what the conservative blogosphere is doing (and doing quite well, I might add), which is to report on hypocrisy when it happens. This second approach is necessary and appropriate, but essentially passive. Andrew understood how to take it home to the Progressives, and to do so in the way most likely to embarrass them and to make for newsworthy moments that, once started, would spread throughout the blogosphere.

What Andrew did was also different from what intellectual stalwarts, such as Benjamin Shapiro, are doing. People like Ben counter the stupid arguments, but they don’t create Kodak moments of hypocrisy. I think Ben and his like are wonderful, and we need lots more like them. Even better, we need to have them offer seminars to all conservative politicians and politician wannabes, so these guys and gals don’t open mouth and insert foot every time a camera is near.

O’Keefe, though, is cut straight from the Breitbart mold. He is a master of puckish confrontation. He doesn’t get into the face of well-known Progressives and Progressive organizations simply by screaming at or fighting with them. Instead, he infiltrates their brains by taking their own beliefs and biases, and then playing straight to those issues. In this way, because the Progressives think he’s sympathetic, they drop the mask and say what they really think, whether it’s a PBS executive who bad-mouths Israel, or ACORN outlets that willingly help pimps or, in this case, anti-Second Amendment journalists who refuse to practice what they preach: